Biden will likely skip King Charles III’s coronation: report

When King Charles III is officially crowned at Westminster Abbey on May 6 — the British monarchy’s first coronation ceremony in seven decades — President Biden is not expected to be among the world leaders in attendance, according to a report.

“That does not feel like an event Joe Biden will attend,” a White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity told Time Magazine.

However, the official emphasized that Biden’s schedule for May has not been finalized.

Charles ascended to the throne in September after the death of his 96-year-old mother, Queen Elizabeth II, who reigned as British monarch for 70 years.

Biden has spoken of his admiration for the Queen, whom he met as a senator in 1982 and then as commander in chief in 2021.

After she died, he called her “a great lady” and “an incredibly decent and gracious woman.”

Biden was among hundreds of world leaders and dignitaries that filled Westminster Abbey for Elizabeth’s funeral.

The president, a proud Irish American, has also openly spoken about his mother’s disdain for England and the British Monarchy. Catherine “Jean” Biden reportedly hated England so much that she refused to sleep in a bed that the Queen had once slept in.

In his memoir “Promises to Keep,” Biden said that the Finnegans, his Irish American family on his mother’s side, held deeply onto “Irish grudges.” He recalled one of his aunts saying about his dad, “You’re father’s not a bad man. He’s just English.”

Ahead of his meeting with the Queen in 1982, his mother told him, “Don’t you bow down to her.”

Formal invitations to Charles’ coronation are scheduled to be sent out to foreign monarchs and other world leaders in April, the Daily Mail reported.

A spokesperson for the British embassy in Washington, DC, told Time that an updated list of those invited to the ceremony would be released “in due time.”

If Biden skips out on Charles’ coronation, he would not be the first US president to do so.

According to Time, President Dwight D. Eisenhower did not go to London for Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953. 

He instead sent a four-person delegation of prominent envoys: Fleur Cowles, an editor and writer from New York City; Omar Bradley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff who commanded US forces during the D-Day invasion; George Marshall, a former secretary of state who was behind the Marshall Plan, an initiative to rebuild Europe at the end of World War II; and Earl Warren, who would later serve as chief justice on the Supreme Court.

The Queen did not seem to feel slighted by Eisenhower’s absence, and the two met at the White House for a state banquet in 1957, where she gave the president scones made from an old family recipe, Time reported.